Instructor

Ted Morrissey

Class Type 

Literature

Course Description

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is best known for his most provocative novel, Lolita (1955), but the controversy surrounding the worldwide best-seller obscured the fact that Nabokov had been an important and prolific writer of fiction since the 1920s, and for the first twenty years of his career he wrote and published exclusively in Russian. This course will examine some of Nabokov’s early stories and novels, works that distinguished him as one of the premier prose stylists of the twentieth-century, long before he wrote the notorious Lolita. We will of course read his books in translation, but translations that Nabokov himself had a hand in preparing, which will also give us the opportunity to discuss the art of literary translation as Nabokov and his son Dmitri (his usual collaborator) provided copious notes regarding their work and why they made the translation choices that they did.

Textbook

Nabokov, Vladimir. King, Queen, Knave (Vintage, 1989) [978-0679723400]
Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark [a.k.a. Camera Obscura] (Vintage, 1989) [978-0679724506]
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Luzhin Defense [a.k.a. The Defense] (Vintage, 1990) [978-0679727224]
Nabokov, Vladimir. Mary (Vintage, 1989) [978-0679726203]
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage, 1997). [978-0679729976]